4 cups Power Flour with one teaspoon of salt mixed in. (in a metal bowl)

1 teaspoon and a half of rapid Rise Yeast in a glass of 5 ounces of warm water.Add 1 tablespoon of sugar and mix with a spoon in the warm water.After the sugar and yeast do their thing, add a tablespoon of olive oil to the mix and stir it up with a spoon.

In another cup, pour 9 ounces of the beer of your choice. ( i used the cinder Bock tonight)

Pour in the warm water mixture into the bowl of flour and stir in with your hand.Then pour in the 9 ounces of beer into the bowl of flour and mix with your hand..

At this point: You can either kneed the dough by hand or use a mixing bowl with a hook - for about 10 mins till you feel the dough to be very soft and elastic like.

Coat the dough ball with Olive oil and put into a Glad freezer bag and store in the refrigerator for at least 24 hours for a COLD RISE.

After the cold rise process: This large dough ball can be divided into three smaller dough balls to make three 14" pizzas'.

I will post a the complete pizza picture later after the dough develops it's flavor. However, i want to show the difference between the Samuel Adams CINDER BOCK and the Samuel Adams DOUBLE BOCK. I am not sure if you can find the CINDER BOCK since it is a first batch release. I fortunately stumbled upon it. (The Cinder Bock comes in a 1 pint 6 FL. oz bottle)

i am hoping that this beer will give the pizza that "wood fire pizza oven taste", since it has that Smokey flavor to it. This beer, like all Double Bocks, has a sweet flavor to it, which makes the dough so tasty.

NOTE: Even though this beer is a darker amber color, it did NOT make the dough a darker color.

Some of my favorite beer to use in the dough making process is called a Double Bock. Samuel Adams has been making a great Double Bock. However, I recently found a Samuel Adams "CINDER BOCK".

Actually the Cinder Bock is a Doppelbock (correct term for a "Double Bock"). A Bock beer is 6.3 to 7.2 percent ABV (Alcohol By Volume), a doppelbock is 7.0 to 10 percent ABV. The distinction is important in baking, as for drinking. American Craft Beer makers are terrible about properly labeling their beers and this leads to much confusion. I have had arguments with people from Anheuser Busch to Cigar City brewing about this problem and I will continue, but, I digress. The amount of residual sugars left in the beer after fermentation between the two styles is considerable and in proportion to the alcohol difference (usually).

The Samuel Adams Cinder Boch made the dough taste FANTASTIC!!!!!!!!!!!! I will definitely use it again.

The dough did a great cold rise. I marked it to be divided into three, cut it, then press one part out into a 14" pizza that i placed onto a pizza screen for cooking. (this recipe makes three 14" pizzas')

Decided to make a Pineapple and Canadian Bacon pizza this time with Pizzaiolo for the sauce, and Bella Rosano Whole Milk Mozzarella Cheese. Baked it in the oven at 450 degrees for 15 minutes on a Pizza Screen.

(I am including an older picture of my pizza screen for anyone who is trying this for the first time.)

PSYou can see my Kitchen Counter top remodel compared to the old counter in the pizza screen photo.

As long as the beers are NOT a stout, they work very well. However, there is something about the Double Bock beers that makes the dough taste improve the most. I think it is the sweet flavor taste in them that brings it all together. On my last batch of dough, I used a little more beer than usual to experiment. (8oz normal, but did about 10oz of double bock beer this time). The result is, what people would refer to as: "Sticky Dough". It turned out very nice, but it took extra flour and time to press it out. However, the nice thing about making it at home for you and your family, is that I do not have a line of customers waiting or watching the clock. So the pizza making is fun, not a job.

Made two different pizzas with dough made using this Samuel Adams beer. One pizza was a white Pizza and the other was a BBQ chicken pizza.

The Beer did NOT have a good taste for me. I was worried that the dough would not turn out very well. I even poured the rest of the beer down the drain. (FORGIVE ME Meatballs/RON) However, to my surprise the dough turned out AMAZING. Others that tried the pizza also LOVED the dough with this beer. I will use this again, but can't get used to the taste as a drinkable beer. Not sure how to describe this beer or what is really in it? But, it worked!!!

Sorry, no pizza pictures to show you because the pizzas were eaten up as soon as they came out of the oven.

Barley Wines are the strongest of beers checking in at almost wine strength alcohol. In obtaining that strength of alcohol in a beer an excess of unfermented sugars are often present. Thus, barley wines are sweet on the palate and additional bittering hops must be added to prevent the beer from being cloying. Very high alcohol strength beers (up to 13%) can be brewed with belgian yeasts that are not overly sweet but the flavor profile is different than a "regular" beer. Barley Wine is basically an English style of beer using English style yeasts (great variation here but its a good guideline) which do not have a the alcohol tolerance of Belgian yeasts (which are often mutated wine yeasts).

These are beers to be sipped and a full 12 ounce bottle is an awful lot, unless you want to consider it a "split" between two people. They are best aged, like a wine. For optimal drinking, depending on the beer, year brewed, aging conditions, etc. I would recommend 2 to 5 years. for cooking, aged is probably better as the bitter hops will die back and not bitter the dough, unless that is what you want. I'm sure such a beer would express its flavors in a pizza, you seem to be moving toward very full flavored and high alcohol beers in your quest for pizza dough. Unless the beer is in a Belgian style, higher alcohol will point toward greater residual sugars and more intense flavor.

Is ok not to like a beer. Not every beer is for everybody, but, for me, every beer is ok for this somebody. If you like this barley wine, try Bigfoot from Sierra Nevada, its the ultimate American style Barley Wine, at least for me. I recommend 3 years of age although it can go longer, I currently have bottles back to 2004 and they are great, not the "sweet spot" but really good.

If you can track down a bottle of Hunnapuh, from Cigar City in Tampa Florida, I think it would have an immense impact on your dough. If you can't get Hunnapuh (its really difficult), then try to find Marshal Zhukhov's from Cigar City, about 13% and intensely flavored Imperial Stout (a Barley Wine style Stout).

Good Luck, I love commenting on this thread, personally, I like my dough plain but your escapades are fascinating to me on a beer level.

I love reading the comments. I'm an aspiring home brewer and readily eat up any bit of knowledge I can get from others. As soon as the weather cools down a bit, I plan to get a batch of (very basic) hefe going - my carboy has been tied up for the last year with a batch of my wife's mead....

The name alone got me to try this beer. It worked well in the dough and turned out very well. However, this is not one that i would consider immediately running out to get again. It did drink well, but not the same effect that the Double Bock or Barley Wine Ale beers have. Again, this is a good beer, but not what I was looking for in a pizza dough beer.

I could be wrong here??? With my limited beer knowledge, I could be comparing apples to oranges because that Barley Wine Ale Beer sure had some power / kick to it!!!

Baked-up four pizzas today in the Blodgett 1048, two of which were made with the 60/40 Fat Tire Ale/water blend at 63% hydration. The crusts all came out good. These were made with a blend of Pendleton Power/Monkato flour. The 48-hour rise in the fridge was quite large and both pizzas had excellent spring. Cooking time was six minutes. I served the pizza to three couples, ourselves included. Frankly, I couldn't taste much difference between the beer dough and a Lehmann Dough, though I liked the smell of the fermenting beer-laced dough. However, my wife and the wives of my taster buddies both loved the finished crust. My wife said it was the best I've made so far and our female guests said it was the best they've ever eaten. So while all the men in our group liked the crust fine as they sipped an ice-cold Fat Tire, the non-drinking women were absolutely crazy about it . . . about the opposite of what I would have expected.

The questions I now have are:

Is beer in the dough worth the extra cost and labor in making dough for market? A batch of 50 dough balls would need about 300 fluid ounces of beer or about 2 1/2 gallons or 25x 12 oz bottles. Purchasing beer for about $6.00 per twelve pack, that would mean a cost increase of about 25 cents for each dough ball.

What specific beer would have the most positive impact to flavor and texture, relative to cost increase minimization?

This test result is a real head-scratcher. I now have more questions than when I started.

Upon further reflection, beer may just be the answer. After a long swim, I walked into the kitchen hungry and reheated a slice of pepperoni/mushroom that had beer in the dough. I sat down, eating slowly and marveling at the light, tender, and airy crust. The crunch, the char, the full-flavor was there. The crust was soft with a crunchy shell and not a bit chewy. I just sort of marveled at how truly good this slice was even though it was 8 hours old.

However, my wife and the wives of my taster buddies both loved the finished crust. My wife said it was the best I've made so far and our female guests said it was the best they've ever eaten. So while all the men in our group liked the crust fine as they sipped an ice-cold Fat Tire, the non-drinking women were absolutely crazy about it . . . about the opposite of what I would have expected.

The questions I now have are:

Is beer in the dough worth the extra cost and labor in making dough for market?

Hello Pizza De Puta,

I think you answered your own question. Everyone loved the pizza, your best yet. Sometimes when you are the one making and sampling the pizza on a regular basis, you don't notice the taste as much as other people do. To me, it is worth the extra cost. (But i am making it at home and not in business) The beer that I use often are Double Bocks. I love the Double Bock that Samuel Adams makes. They are sweeter tasting beers.

A friend that owns several Pizzerias, always adds beer to the flour and uses ESB, by Red Hook, exclusively. This is a more bitter tasting beer and does not cost as much as the Double Bock beers. (see page one of this thread)

A tavern in town, advertises beer in their dough and they use Samuel Adams and other beers. In fact, they change it up each month for variety. They also offer one size pizza 14", with the beer dough and they offer pizza NOT made with beer. (see his sign on the tavern wall, on page 7 of this thread) He will pair the finished pizza made with beer, served with the same beer that the dough was made with. Quite fun to drink a cold beer and eat pizza made with that same beer. People like it.

It's up to you. However, I will always add beer to my pizza dough. I love what it does to the texture and the flavor.

I forgot the mention that I use the Pendleton POWER flour by itself. I only mixed the two earlier in this thread because I had a bag of each. The POWER flour has a higher protein level and so it can last longer in the fridge and IMO, it has a better texture over all than Mondako.

Baked-up four pizzas today in the Blodgett 1048, two of which were made with the 60/40 Fat Tire Ale/water blend at 63% hydration. The crusts all came out good. These were made with a blend of Pendleton Power/Monkato flour. The 48-hour rise in the fridge was quite large and both pizzas had excellent spring. Cooking time was six minutes. I served the pizza to three couples, ourselves included. Frankly, I couldn't taste much difference between the beer dough and a Lehmann Dough, though I liked the smell of the fermenting beer-laced dough. However, my wife and the wives of my taster buddies both loved the finished crust. My wife said it was the best I've made so far and our female guests said it was the best they've ever eaten. So while all the men in our group liked the crust fine as they sipped an ice-cold Fat Tire, the non-drinking women were absolutely crazy about it . . . about the opposite of what I would have expected.

The questions I now have are:

Is beer in the dough worth the extra cost and labor in making dough for market? A batch of 50 dough balls would need about 300 fluid ounces of beer or about 2 1/2 gallons or 25x 12 oz bottles. Purchasing beer for about $6.00 per twelve pack, that would mean a cost increase of about 25 cents for each dough ball.What specific beer would have the most positive impact to flavor and texture, relative to cost increase minimization?

This test result is a real head-scratcher. I now have more questions than when I started.

We had a blind taste test today when I invited a few friends over to sample several pizzas. Pizzas #1 and #2 were both cheese and consisted of a 50/50 Power/Monkato blend of flour at 64% and proofed 24 hours. #1 used water and #2 used 50/50 water and Fat Tire Ale. Pizza #2 turn-out a little darker and crispier due to cooking variance which skewed the results.

The testers were told that the pizzas were "formulated differently" but little else. One guest was a former Navy cook and beer lover who actually slightly preferred #1 for its "lighter" flavor. His tea-tottling wife preferred #2 and was actually embarassed at the result of the test. Tasters favored pizza #2 with beer slightly over the non-beer but it was really close.

The BIG surprised came when #4, a non-beer version that had overproofed, was reballed twice, and was 120+ hours old, was stretched and used at the last minute of today's testing party. The flavor, texture, and spring of this dough, combined with a unique blend of toppings proved to be a KILLER. While beer and water seems to be a bit of a hair-splitting exercise, addtional aging, 2nd & 3rd proofing, and reballing beyond 48 hours really got the tasters excited.